Vernissage. June 11, 2016
Press Release: Hauser & Wirth Zürich is delighted to present a solo exhibition
of works by the late American sculptor, painter and draughtsman, David
Smith (1906 – 1965). A titan of 20th-century art, Smith transformed the
innovations of European modernism into a richly diverse new artistic
language. Over a 33-year career he greatly expanded the notion of what
sculpture could be, its relationship to space and importantly moved the
site of its production, and ultimately our experience of it, from the
artist’s atelier and art foundry into the realms of industry and nature.
Spanning pure abstraction and poetic figuration, Smith’s deeply
humanist vision has inspired generations of sculptors for over 50 years
since his death.
This exhibition marks the gallery’s first presentation of the artist
since beginning work with the estate in 2015, and focuses on Smith’s
practice between 1958 and 1964, the important final years of his life.
The late 1950s marked a dramatic expansion of his ambition and
productivity and by the 1960s Smith was at the height of his creative
powers, garnering international attention as the leading sculptor of his
generation. Exploring the dialogue between Smith’s use of form and
colour, geometry and gesture, the show brings together a selection of
painted steel sculptures and spray-paint works, highlighting Smith’s
objective to merge the concerns of two- and three-dimensional media.
Painting and drawing remained integral to Smith’s creative output
throughout his career. ‘Drawings’, he claimed, ‘are studies for
sculpture, sometimes what sculpture is, sometimes what sculpture never
can be’. Around 1958, almost immediately after the invention of the
aerosol spray can, Smith began his Sprays. Made simultaneously to some
of his most rigorously geometric sculpture, the Sprays are often loosely
gestural. Though the Sprays freed Smith’s form from the constraints of
gravity, and his sculpture, for Smith the two mediums were conceptually
continuous. The exhibition’s inclusion of both sculpture and painting
enriches the viewer’s understanding of Smith’s oeuvre, emphasising his
conviction that every facet of his visual output represents an essential
element of his total artistic vision.
With the Sprays, Smith adopted a medium that was developed from, and
was perfectly aligned with, his sculptural process. When creating a
sculpture, Smith would often place components of the work in progress on
his white painted floor before joining them together. The welding often
scorched the paint surface leaving negative images of the sculpture.
Inspired by these incidental patterns, Smith began work on the Sprays,
employing any material at hand, from nuts and bolts to tree branches,
and even leftovers from his table, which he arranged on paper or canvas
before spraying over the composition with industrial enamel paint. When
the objects were removed, ghostly silhouettes remained, their outlines
hazy from the diffused paint that seeped beneath the objects’ edges. The
Sprays encapsulate the overlap between two- and three-dimensional
activities in Smith’s practice. As in the artist’s sculptures, the
Sprays present an interplay of simple, bold forms to produce complex
rhythms in space. They examine the ambiguity between positive and
negative space, contrasting layers of effervescent colour with a vacuum
of pure white. Exercising spontaneity absent from sculpture, the Sprays
represent a direct and unmediated form of expression that, for Smith,
provided more than simple studies for his sculptural work.
Appearing contemporary and ever-relevant today, Smith’s sculptures
were seen as an extremely radical challenge to modernist taste at the
time they were made. The sculptures featured in the exhibition
illustrate Smith’s increasing focus on the visual nature of
three-dimensional work, and its potential as a painterly medium. In
‘Dida’s Circle on a Fungus’ (1961) and ‘Ninety Father’ (1961), the
contrast between loosely painted surface – textural marks made by Smith
with industrial enamels and small brushes which are often compared to
the spontaneous brushwork of Abstract Expressionists – and assertive
geometric forms, creates a lyrical balance. Far beyond cosmetic
application, Smith’s use of colour controls the form, the dappled finish
working to soften the strict, geometric lines.
‘Circles Intercepted’ (1961) is in many respects a three-dimensional
painting. Smith’s dramatically different treatment of colour and form
on the two ‘sides’ of the sculpture exemplifies his most radical
contribution to the language of sculpture – that is the virtual
impossibility for the viewer to ‘possess’ the totality of the object as
he / she experiences it from different views. When seen from the front,
other views of the sculpture can never be predicted. The viewer is
forced to experience the sculpture as a series of unique images in real
time, rather than viewing it, and then ‘producing’ its wholeness in
one’s own imagination. The work has a muscular authority, and is a
tour-de-force in which very heavy plates of steel are suspended in
mid-air before our eyes. In addition, the handmade quality and
irregularities of the circular forms assert the physical reality of the
layered concentric discs as they are pushed and pulled in space –
intercepted – by the bars radiating through them. It is all the more
noteworthy in this context how Smith used the application of paint to
alter the specific weights and forms of the sculpture, and to ultimately
prioritise the visual over the physical.
Painted sculpture, in and of itself, was not new – although it was
unorthodox at a time when ‘truth to materials’ was the standard,
accepted practice for sculpture. As Smith noted, sculpture had been
painted from its earliest history. Smith however, introduced a
distinctly modern conceptual intention, one that, like his Sprays, takes
on vision itself as a subject; Smith was not making painted sculpture,
he was making sculpture about painting.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully–illustrated catalogue
featuring historic archival images and an essay by curator and art
historian Michelle White.
JUNE 12 - 18 SEPTEMBER
